The other day, my twenty-one-month-old son received a gift of a toy locomotive engine. It was connected by shiny, dome-shaped magnets to an accompanying coal tender. The two pieces fit neatly in his hands, and for several minutes he attached and detached them and made the sounds of a train whistle. He then noticed that the engine had a face (as do most trains he seems to encounter as toys or in books). He looked at the coal tender, then at the face, and said, “Eat it?”

I said yes (surely confusing him more), just as he eats food for energy, the train “eats” coal. He still seemed puzzled, so I tried a line from one of his books, “The tender carries the coal that burns in the firebox.” With that, he gave up on me and returned to the sounds of a train whistle.

While there are important differences between digestion and combustion, they do indeed both represent the transformation of energy from one form into another. Chemical to kinetic to heat and so on and on—these transformations constrain and enable everything from plate tectonics to photosynthesis to the material development of human societies (and, of course, locomotives). But is it correct to state, as did the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892, that “In the last analysis everything that happens is nothing but changes in energy?”1 Can energy serve as the fundamental common denominator for understanding the universe, from the galactic scale to the cellular and the natural to the social?

Such a comprehensive analysis forms the basis for Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society, a complete revision of his General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, published by Wiley in 1991.2 While the new book is not a work of history, it is informed by Smil’s knowledge of the past. Smil is not himself a historian, but a scholar reaching across disciplines to understand the role of energy in the physical and human worlds, past, present, and future.

Others before Smil have developed holistic studies of energy in natural and social contexts, and their works have proved provocative but also deeply flawed. In the early 1890s, for example, Ostwald constructed an elaborate and controversial theory of “General Energetics” to embrace not only the unification of natural phenomena, but human consciousness, eugenics, and pacifism.3 In the 1970s, the ecologist Howard Odum became the most prominent advocate of a kind of energy determinism in which “energy is the source and control of all things, all value, and all the actions of human beings and nature.”4 Neither Ostwald nor Odum saw their energetic views widely accepted. There is simply too much history—human, natural, and planetary—inexplicable in energetic terms alone.

Unlike Ostwald and Odum, Smil constructs a more plausible analysis by making energy central without being determinative. Smil is unequivocal that the world, natural or social, historical or contemporary, cannot be reduced merely to energy considerations. He justifies focusing on energy as a unit of analysis because “everything in the observable universe can be seen, analyzed, and explained in energy terms.” Tempering this universality, “even such a fundamental entity as energy . . . cannot be an adequate surrogate for valuing space, time, qualitative attributes of materials, biodiversity, mental labor, ideas, social order, cultural riches, and morality” (pp. 366, 345–46). Smil’s work, then, may be read as a demonstration of both the ubiquity of energy and its limits as a conceptual tool for understanding the world.

The chapters of Energy in Nature and Society progress from cosmic to human scales and, as in previous works, Smil makes good on his promise of interdisciplinarity.5 After introducing his (extensive) terminology and providing a potted history of the concept of energy in chapter 1 (in its simplicity one of the weakest in the book), Smil turns in chapter 2 to describing the energetics of planet Earth—its solar fluxes, internal heat, and the geophysical processes powered by these energy flows. Chapters 3 through 5 present energy in living organisms, first in plants (photosynthesis and the ecologies it creates), then animals (metabolism and the forms of life biological energy systems make possible), and finally humans (metabolism and the energy costs of basic activities). Chapters 6 through 9 explore energy in human societies. Smil traces human history through traditional food production; the preindustrial prime movers of muscle, wind, water, and phytomass power and the technologies they made possible; and lastly, fossil-fueled civilization. The final chapters, 10 through 13, present the consequences and challenges of contemporary energy consumption.

At the factual level, the book is impressive. Open nearly any page and discover gems: as a consequence of improved nutrition, the average height of eleven-year-old Japanese boys has increased almost twenty centimeters during the twentieth century (p. 126). Running barefoot consumes 4 percent less energy than with footwear while also preventing some ankle and lower leg injuries (p. 139). The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 does not rank even in the top thirty largest oil spills since the 1960s (the largest was nearly eight times larger), but the larger spills were located either outside the United States or in deep water (p. 323). Taken individually, this material is little more than trivia; in the framework of the book as a whole, it points to the omnipresence of energy as both a constraint and an enabler for natural and social phenomena.
The book has its limitations, however. Readers familiar with Smil’s previous works may be disappointed at times (as I was) by the recycling of examples, charts, and illustrations. New material and new citations are there, but the book also absorbs what has already appeared elsewhere.

At times, the onslaught of facts and data prevents Smil from rendering a clear judgment. Take his account of coal in the twentieth century. He begins by noting the extraordinary increase in global coal production between 1900 (800 megatons of hard coals and lignites) and the year of peak production, 1989 (4.9 gigatons), a more than fourfold increase. New machines like walking draglines and new modes of production like longwall mining increased productivity while dramatically decreasing the required labor. At the same time, with the rise of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, coal’s share of the global energy mix decreased from about 95 percent in 1900 to a low of 23 percent a century later (pp. 217–21). Yet if we are to draw any conclusions from “coal’s absolute rise and relative decline,” Smil does not tell us. What factors shaped the introduction of new mining technologies? What was the connection between governments, corporations, and labor in this process? Even more basically, did coal become more or less important between 1900 and 2000? These may not be the right questions, but, if not, we are not told what we should ask instead. While coal has decreased its relative share of the energy mix, this seems to me a far less significant fact than its absolute increase. Americans alone today burn more than twice the coal they did in 1950, with all the labor and environmental problems this consumption entails, but with much less awareness of the fact.

Historians of technology may be particularly troubled as well by the relative absence of social, political, or economic context for much of the history covered in the book. In this regard, the historical portions of Energy in Nature and Society remain more a classic history of machines. For example, Smil describes various waterwheels and windmills from antiquity through the nineteenth century with about six pages on their design, efficiencies, geographic diffusion, power they produced, and marvelous illustrations from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, but the closest we come to how they were used and why is Smil’s observation that “both kinds of machines eventually assumed important roles in the economic life of preindustrial Europe, which helped to energize the beginnings of industrialization” (p. 180). This focus on machines helps explain the bibliographic absence of important historians of energy-related topics who adopt more social, cultural, and political approaches, and why “Standard Oil” and “United Mine Workers” do not appear in the index.6

Nevertheless, this is a valuable book that I anticipate referencing often. Smil has not written a work of history, or of thermodynamics, or even a blueprint for dealing with the vexing social and technological problems of energy use in the twenty-first century. He has produced more of a work of philosophy, a way of contemplating the interconnectedness of the world. Our future choices about energy use are constrained by the choices of the past, which were themselves constrained by physical law. Within those constraints lie enormous ranges of action. In our choices, we will be wise to profit from Smil’s erudition.

1. Wilhelm Ostwald, “Studies in Energetics: II. Fundamentals of General Energetics,” trans. R. Bruce Lindsay, in Applications of Energy: Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Bruce Lindsay (Stroudsburg, Pa., 1976), 339.

2. Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. xi+480, $32).

3. After all, once Ostwald adopted his “energetic imperative”—“Do not waste energy, but convert it into a more useful form”—war appeared as a terrible “waste of energy.” Niles R. Holt, “A Note on Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energism,” Isis 61 (1970): 386–89; R. J. Deltete, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics 1: Origins and Motivations,” Foundations of Chemistry 9 (2007): 3–56.

4. Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature (New York, 1976), 1–2.

5. For Smil’s other works, see for example Energy in World History (Boulder, Colo., 1994), Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), and Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

6. For examples of recent works in energy history, see David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), Allison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000), and James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, 1997). Williams, in fact, made a similar point in his review of Smil’s Energy in World History for Technology and Culture (July 1995, pp. 690–92).

Dr. Shulman is an assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, where he is working on a book about energy and U.S. foreign relations in the nineteeenth and early twentieth centuries.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 50 No. 4 (October 2009)